Carved in Bone

seat, the unfortunately named Wartburg—ripped open the mountains themselves, raking low-grade coal from strip mines and bench mines, leaving the ridgetops mutilated and the streams choked with debris and acid.
    Billy Ray had worked a wildcat mine—an illegal, unlicensed one—until the Office of Surface Mining had found it and shut it down. After that, he mined food stamps and disability checks for whatever he could, spending most of what he got in the county’s windowless cinder-block roadhouses. It was in one of them that he and his friend Eddie Meacham had squared off against half a dozen badass bikers. Unfortunately for Meacham, Billy Ray survived his stomping for eighteen days—until the day, in fact, Billy Ray hitched a ride into Knoxville to ask Eddie to take him to a hospital. He never made it there alive, according to Eddie, because upon staggering into Meacham’s apartment, he promptly keeled over, crashed into a glass-topped coffee table, and expired. That, at least, was the story Meacham was telling, and that was the story Burt DeVriess hoped the exhumation and examination would corroborate.
    A freshly waxed black hearse idled at the cemetery entrance, its tinted windows pulsing with rock music cranked up loud enough to wake the dead. Parked beside it was a Caterpillar backhoe in a two-tone color scheme of yellow and rust. From the backhoe’s cab, Tammy Wynette pleaded with me to stand by my man. I wondered if anyone had ever stood by the poor bastard whose eternal rest we were about to interrupt so rudely.
    Native Americans and New Agers alike say it’s wrong to dig up a body after it’s been laid to rest—it disturbs the spirit of the departed, they say—and I’m inclined to agree. Unfortunately, sometimes the alternative is even worse: letting a killer go scot-free…or sending an innocent person to life behind bars. It was the latter misfortune I hoped to avert by disturbing the spirit of the late Billy Ray.
    The morning was gray and chilly as half a dozen of us clustered around a sad little grave outside Wartburg. The cemetery was wedged onto a narrow strip of Cumberland ridgetop, shared by a tiny white clapboard church. The crowd that gathered was quiet and grim. Two uniformed Morgan County sheriff’s deputies stood guard, as if someone might be interested in making off with a plywood coffin and pauper’s corpse that had been deteriorating in the ground for nine months. Knox County prosecutor Bob Roper, still hoping to salvage his murder case against Meacham, stood alongside a Louisiana forensic anthropologist he’d brought in to try to refute my testimony about the impossible wound path. I found myself in the unenviable position of standing next to Burt DeVriess, my nemesis-turned-employer—an arrangement I hoped would prove brief and never to be repeated.
    Not present was Dr. Jessamine Carter, the regional medical examiner from Chattanooga, one hundred miles south of Knoxville. She would rendezvous with us—or, rather, with the body—in the morgue back at UT Medical Center once the exhumation was complete.
    The lawyers had wrangled about which pathologist should reau-topsy the body. Obviously Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton, couldn’t do it, since the competence of his initial autopsy was the issue on which Meacham’s guilt or innocence now turned. Grease had argued that a big-name out-of-state pathologist should be called in—Dr. Michael Baden, for instance, or Dr. Kay Scarpetta—since Hamilton’s Tennessee colleagues might be reluctant to contradict him. The prosecutor countered that if the other MEs in the state couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth in a difficult case, they should all be fired anyhow—was that what Mr. DeVriess was suggesting? After a few sarcastic exchanges along these lines, both lawyers had finally stipulated that Dr. Carter might possibly be acceptable for the job. Dr. Carter—Jess, I was allowed to call her, since we’d worked together on a handful of cases during the past five years—was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. How and why she’d landed in Chattanooga remained a bit of a mystery to me, but she was widely considered an expert in discriminating between antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem trauma—that is, between wounds inflicted before, during, or after the time of death. If there was enough soft tissue left for her to examine, she might be able to tell whether Ledbetter had bled to death from a bizarre